“And don’t ask me any questions until I see whether you can handle that much.”
CHAPTER 4
As Bobby drove through the gates of the Grosse Pointe Shooting Club, I hung my arm out the window and dangled my hat. “Some joint,” I said. I took in the heavy, ivy-covered facade of the old building and listened to the popping of pistols and shotguns from the range out back. “Looks like a funeral home.”
“This is where the big money comes to socialize.” Bobby rubbed his palm over the panel of his car door. “There’s more money changing hands here than in any of the big offices downtown. Mark my words, Pete,” he said. “Pretty soon I’ll be kicking up my heels in a place like this.”
“When you get rich.”
“When I get rich, that’s right. It’s in the works, Pete. Someday remind me to tell you about the little thing I’m running on the side.” Bobby tightened the knot in his tie and smoothed his sparse hair close to his pate. “A little foresight, that’s what it takes. You think Lloyd or Chrysler got rich, excuse my French, standing around with his thumb up his ass, working for somebody else? This police thing is just a temporary stop for me, mister, on the way to something better.”
I mulled it over. I knew that Bobby had been with the department since he was twenty or twenty-one, and so the temporary stop had stretched to something approaching twenty years. And though I had been paired with Bobby for only a short while, I had heard derisive references to his moneymaking schemes and failed side jobs for years.
I said, “Money’s just sitting around waiting for you to find it, eh?”
“That’s exactly right. You have to train yourself to see it. It’s everywhere. Every little thing you see is just floating on a river of it. It’s like a fish floating along in the water. If he never says to himself, ‘Hey, what’s this stuff I’m floating in?’ then he’s never going to be able to take advantage of it, you see? And another thing,” he said, fluttering his hands for emphasis, “it’s always about money, no matter what anybody tells you. Not just in business but in every other thing. Every bit of crime that gets done in Detroit or anywhere, it all comes down to money. You follow the money, and you’ll always get to the bottom of things.”
“So somebody’s getting rich off this dead girl, is that it?” I felt disgust well up. “Big market for dead little girls around here?”
“Jesus, Pete, don’t get hot. I just said that, at the bottom, it’s all money. I don’t say I can attend to every detail. I’m letting you in on some of my stuff, that’s all. I thought you might appreciate it. Listen, I know they all like to get a laugh out of me in the locker room. But let me ask you, do they laugh when they consider the number of good collars I’ve brought in? Is there anybody else with a nose for the dirty stuff like I’ve got?”
“Take it easy,” I said.
“I’m just telling you, it’s like a shell game. Keep your eye on the money. God knows there’s a lot of it floating around here. It seems like you just don’t care about it enough to really think about what it can buy for you. You don’t let yourself care.”
“If I had money, I’d go down to Rocco’s every night and buy me a big porterhouse and a sweet potato, put some brown sugar and cinnamon on it and some butter and dig in. Wash it down with a bucket of Stroh’s. I’d do it every night till I got sick of it.”
Bobby shook his head slowly and slipped a finger under his collar to ease the pinched skin of his neck. I thought I caught a glimpse of real fear in Bobby’s eyes but laid it off on the brightness of the midday sun and the play of light and dark in the car.
“Money makes you slippery, Pete. It gives you a little insurance, a little room to angle when they come after you, see? If you’ve got money, you can use it to get more for yourself than you would have if you started out with nothing and put in the same amount of work and sweat. I’m not just being greedy, Pete. You know I’ve got Anna and the girl to think about. But it’s no sense being a sap about it. If you can at least get a handle on what’s going on around you, if you can figure out what makes everybody scramble, then you’re halfway there.”
I gave him the eye for a moment and then said, “Halfway to where?”
“Don’t get hot about it, Pete,” said Bobby. “I’m just trying to help you out.”
We left the car on the big circular drive. As we stepped into the cooled air of the building, I whispered, “I told you it’s like a funeral home.”
The place had been carefully modeled after an English gentleman’s club, with heavy dark paneling over the walls, dark leather furniture, subdued light, and submissive waiters carrying drinks on silver trays to lounging old men reading financial papers. Shelves of leather-bound books lined one entire wall, broken only by the stone hearth and fireplace, idle now. A bank of windows, tiny panes of beveled glass, looked outdoors onto the rear of the club, over the target range and back to the hill beyond the trap and skeet areas. I took a moment to orient myself and realized with a smile that any stray bullets or shot making it over the hill would probably land over the city boundary in Detroit proper.
We found Roger Hardiman on a fieldstone patio out back, barking orders to a colored boy, who tried frantically to load clay pigeons into a trap quickly enough to suit him.
“Pull, damn you!”
The boy let loose two low-flying pigeons. Hardiman followed the first sharply with his shotgun, blasted the thing to dust before it had gone thirty yards, and blew apart the second just as it reached the crest of its flight. I studied the executive’s sweating forehead, his leather-shouldered shooting jacket, his fancy colored shooting glasses. Another man might have been attending to family matters, to funeral arrangements, or to his own grief after losing his only daughter, the apple of his eye—but Hardiman, I could see, approached things from his own angle.
“Mr. Hardiman, sir,” said Bobby.
“Swope, you’ve finally made it, I see.” Hardiman broke the gun over his elbow. He pulled the two hot shells expertly with his glossy fingernails and dropped them to the patio. To the colored attendant he said, “Lose yourself, boy, we’ve got some things to talk about.” He drew a bright white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow.
“Caudill, is it?” he said, extending his hand. “I have come to understand you have quite a reputation.”
I returned Hardiman’s powerful grip, met his look. “I didn’t know I had a reputation.”
“I knew your father as well. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“It seems you don’t know much,” said Hardiman.
“He doesn’t let on,” said Bobby. “Mr. Hardiman, sir, we won’t take up too much of your time—”
“No, you won’t. I called you here, remember? I’ve some things to say that couldn’t be spoken last night with my wife present. What progress have you made?”
“We’ve got two men canvassing the neighborhood. They’ll turn up something, I’m sure. We’re about to see what we can do to track down Toby Thrumm, a known associate of Pease.” Bobby held his hands clasped together like the director of a funeral home.
“In other words, you’ve nothing at all. A whole day has gone by and you’ve nothing at all.”
“That’s right,” I said. I sized up Hardiman. Natural-born salesman, confident, pushy, the worst kind: believes what he’s selling, entirely oblivious to anything but what’s on his own plate. “Pease probably skipped out by now.”
Hardiman turned his attention from Bobby to me. “You think it’s possible that Pease went back to his people in the South?”
“Likely. If you get hooked up with something like this, no matter how much of a dope you are, you know how hot it’s going to get.”
“What sort of authority do you fellows have to go down there and get him?”
“None,” I said. I wasn’t about to lower my head or put my eye aside for him.
“Well, listen. I’ve got a thousand dollars—that’s five hundred apiece—if you’ll get that jigaboo and bring him
back here for me.”
“And then what happens to him?” I tipped the brim of my hat back and stared down my nose at him.
“You leave that to me.”
“You got some other flunkies you can pay to do your dirty work so your pansy hands don’t get bloody?”
“Pete!” said Bobby. “Take it easy!”
“Listen here, Mr. Caudill. My hands have seen their share of blood. Unlike you, I know how to wash up afterward, and I’ve the social grace to think of it as an imperative. My concern is directed by a head for business. If it makes sense for me to a job myself, I do it. If a job doesn’t require the use of the skill I might bring to bear, I shop the job out to someone whose time isn’t as valuable as mine. Now, I could buy ten of you with what I keep in my petty cash account. With one telephone call I could have you sweeping streets and cleaning sewers in Hamtramck. So no matter how tough you think you are, you’re only getting half the picture. Without money, without a wide circle of influential friends and a deep involvement in the community and its running, you’re nothing. Nothing. Rootless like a dry leaf blowing.” Hardiman pulled in his breath deeply and let it out as he put his handkerchief away. “Now, I want that nigger found and brought to me. If the two of you can’t use the money, I’ll find someone who can.”
“How is it,” I said, “that a bright boy like you can’t keep a teenaged girl in line?” I pulled my hands from my pockets, felt heat throb in them, felt the heat radiating from the barrel of Hardiman’s shotgun.
“That mouth of yours will dig your grave one of these days, Mr. Caudill.” He paused and tried to drive that home with a level stare. “Now, you bring me that nigger’s balls or don’t show your face near me again. Our business here is finished.” Hardiman turned, red and sweating.
* * *
As he drove, Bobby tapped his nails on the roof of the car. “Jesus, Pete, what was that all about?”
“Just seeing what Hardiman’s made of.”
“Couldn’t you find a nicer way to do it? You need to learn how to grease people a little bit.”
“I’m giving him more credit than you are,” I said. “Why’s he want Pease’s balls?”
“Jesus, Pete, if you had a daughter killed like that—”
“Leave off with that. You know as well as I do it wasn’t Pease,” I told him. “Probably Hardiman’s guessed it, too.”
Bobby spent a few moments looking from me to the road and back. “You’re probably right.”
“Sure I’m right. First off, Pease is an idiot. You read the book on him? How he got caught in St. Louis? Stole a car and drove it over a fire hydrant right in front of a scout car.” I worked my hands around the brim of my hat in my lap, thinking of Hardiman’s long neck and of the lack of concern he seemed to feel for Jane.
Bobby said weakly, “I don’t hear much on Pease except that he’s been running numbers in the west side neighborhoods.”
“Listen, it takes some kind of stomach to do that to a girl, such a young girl. For these guys, slapping them around is one thing. But a small-time lifter like Pease couldn’t come up with the marbles for this type of treatment, not especially with a rich white man’s daughter, and not especially with the way things are right now in this town.”
“So you don’t figure him at all,” said Bobby.
“Hell, no.”
“Who, then?” Bobby gestured with both hands on top of the steering wheel, showing blue veins below the pale skin of his palms.
“You’re the senior man here,” I said. “I worked up a good sweat just thinking that much.” I could see that Bobby had hoped Pease’s guilt would not be called into question. Pinning it all on Pease, finding him, and dragging him to Hardiman would settle things easily and maybe lead to a big payoff. It was just lazy, slippery thinking, and I was getting to feel that lazy thinking could be dangerous. But it fit Bobby like a second skin.
“You’d almost have to be crazy to pull something like this,” said Bobby. “The way things are down in Black Bottom—it’s just too many people crowded too close together, see? Come the real summertime, when it all boils over, know where I’ll be?”
“Standing on the corner of Chase Alley and Riopelle,” I said, “selling baseball bats for ten bucks a pop.” I adjusted the eye patch a bit and moved the strap higher on the back of my head.
Bobby pulled back his face into a smile. “And you’d head for the hills, if there was any hills around here.”
“I’ll be cooling my heels on a boat in the middle of Lake St. Clair, pretending to have some bait on the line,” I said.
“Well, Pete, if things ran good all the time, there wouldn’t be any need for us on the police force. We’d be sweating like pigs at Chrysler’s.”
“I’m sweating like a pig now.”
“So you don’t think it was Pease went back to beat up Thrumm, either?”
I closed my eye and leaned back. “Pease is too little to have done something like that all alone.”
“Some other niggers got something for Thrumm?”
“It’s too much to believe all at once.”
“So you think,” said Bobby, “that whoever killed the girl came back for Thrumm after we left?”
“That sounds right.”
“But that would mean—”
“That they’ve been watching us.” I breathed deeply and worked a point into my hat’s brim with the three digits of my left hand. “We’ve been putting on a monkey show for them.”
“Jesus.”
I stared out the window as the bustling city rolled by. The Arsenal of Democracy, they called it. Detroit was a great steaming engine, pouring out a steady supply of steel and power to the front lines of the war. An idea flickered through my head, and it felt right: Someone was deliberately trying to mess things up in the city. Looking at it Bobby’s way, what profit could there be in that? In terms of business, I never figured out how everything could work like it did. I could not bring my mind to understand what all those men in the white shirts could possibly be doing at Chrysler’s or Lloyd Motors to bring in a profit—adding up to millions for the men in charge. It seemed to me that they were just talking all the time or shuffling numbers on papers. And if I couldn’t understand how a regular company might work, how could I understand how it might profit anybody to wreck things?
But then it was in all the papers; you heard it every day on the radio and every time a gaggle of old broads stood gossiping at the back fence: Loose lips sink ships; there were enemy agents among us. I could see that the Japs or the Germans might like nothing better than to foul up production in Detroit. Even if it would cost them millions, they wanted to wreck us, and I could understand that. But I couldn’t quite make myself believe that there were spies about. The war seemed so far away. If I hadn’t already lost a brother to it, I would have wondered if it was real at all.
If I could trust my gut, I knew that our problems slept closer to home. No spy would come halfway around the world just to meddle with a rich man’s daughter when he could put dynamite to almost any plant in the area. Our trouble, I knew somehow, had sprouted up from our own soil, our own foul history. As I began to realize how deep the water had swelled up around us, I mashed my teeth together and clutched at my hat. Detroit, like any big city, was built atop the flimsiest house of cards imaginable, the basic civil cooperation between its citizens. I had been a police officer long enough to know that civil behavior, when it broke down, did so in a flash. A husband breaks a bottle over his wife’s head; a rummy knifes another drunk over a half-empty bottle. If we could not find a way to handle things quickly, I sensed, the pending summer in Detroit would be one to remember. My throat clenched as I considered it. Detroit was the only place I had ever lived. Where could I go if it all broke down?
CHAPTER 5
I wondered what Bobby thought of the early brush-off. To me, the day had been a waste: talk and more talk. We had not made any progress toward finding Pease or whoever was responsible for the girl’s earl
y exit. In fact, everything seemed less sure, and the situation had become spongy, too soggy to get a firm grip on. Nobody knew anything, nobody had anything to say. Walker and Johnson had turned up nothing. They had run into either a stone wall or genuine ignorance in their door-knocking. Nothing on the boy, Joshua, and no indication that the people near the apartment had heard or seen anything amiss. It was all coming together to remind me that too much thinking always took something away from you. Even if you got somewhere by thinking, it always left a rawness in your throat that you couldn’t wash down.
So when the regular end to our shift came, I told Bobby to drop me off at home. To Bobby’s objections I only raised my bad hand like a traffic cop. I knew that Bobby was probably still out driving somewhere, scrounging for some hint of information, driven by the vague tickling at the back of the head that dicks get when they know there’s a piece somewhere that’ll fall into place and wipe away the fog. In Bobby’s case, it was not so easy to say what kept him going day and night. Though he had a beautiful wife and a little girl at home, Bobby did his best to avoid the place. He seemed most at home swimming through the tangle of petty motivations he found in the dark corners of the city. There was also the dangling carrot of Hardiman’s money, which seemed like something that got talked about but never showed up in anyone’s hand.
After cutting out on Bobby, I stood in my shorts before the mirror in my bathroom. I pulled the patch off my eye and rubbed the red outline on my nose and cheekbone, tried to smooth away the groove pressed into my brow by the thin leather strap. When I bought the patch, it seemed hard and funny to me that I’d spent a small fortune on the finest one I could find, beautifully tooled and stitched and lined with thick red satin cloth, but none of that saved me from the discomfort I could have bought more cheaply. I hung the patch on a hook alongside the mirror, and then I drew up cool water from the tap and splashed it on my face. Fair enough, I thought. Bobby can go hang himself. I’ve got things to do.
I placed a shallow bowl in the sink, poured a small portion of table salt into it, filled it with warm water, and mixed it with my hands until I could no longer feel the scraping of the salt over my knuckles and my nails. With a turkey baster I kept in the linen closet, I sucked up some of the salty water, leaned over the sink, and washed out the cavity of my eye. Then I carefully removed my glass eye from its box, rinsed it in the salty water, and placed it in the socket.
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